Win and his brother Will Butler come from a real family of musicians. Her father Edwin Farnham Butler II, also known as Edwin Butler, is a jazz musician and band leader. A saxophone and clarinet player, he thrived on the Texas jazz scene and later in Montreal, Canada, where the Butlers grew up. Her mother, Liza Rey, began performing with her mother’s singing group, The King Family, in the 1960s. She has played the harp on several Arcade Fire albums, most notably Funeral and Neon Bible. She often plays jazz tunes in the style of Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald in many local clubs and bars in the Maine area.
Win and Will Butler’s grandfather, Alvino Rey (1908-2014), is even more in the limelight. He was active as a musician and bandleader, especially in the 1930s and 1940s, and gained a brilliant reputation with his precise banjo playing. Considered the pioneer of steel guitar, he developed a special technique called “stringy” in which he plucked the guitar’s strings with his fingers instead of fingering them.
In 1935 Rey was hired by Gibson to make a prototype pickup based on his own pickup designed for the banjo. The result was eventually used in Gibson’s first electric guitar, the ES-150. In 1939, Rey also developed a carbon microphone to change the sound of his electric guitar.
His virtuosic playing style made him one of the most accomplished guitarists of his time and an icon of swing. Together with the Alvino Rey Orchestra he had a total of ten top 10 hits, the most famous being “Idaho” (1941, composed by Jesse Stone) and “Deep in the Heart of Texas”, which was released in 1942. The list of musicians who worked for the band is incredible: Johnny Mandel, Mel Lewis, Don Lamond, Alfred Burt, Al Cohn, Zoot Sims and Herbie Steward. In 1943 Charles Mingus even played in Rey’s band for a short time.
Because of the infamous recording ban, with which musicians protested against the music industry for two years, the musician dissolved his group, but started a new formation after the war, which also produced five hits. In the 50s, however, Rey broke up the combo and baked smaller buns. He worked as the musical director of the King Sisters, in which his wife Luise (the grandmother of Win and Will Butler) also sang. In the 1970s, the avowed Mormon moved to Salt Lake City, where he formed a jazz quartet that performed regularly at Disneyland. He also worked as a missionary in Hawaii in the 1980s. Ray continued to work actively as a musician until 1994, but then retired.
In interviews, Win Butler repeatedly emphasizes that his grandfather Alvino is also an important inspiration for Arcade Fire.
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